stratisphere

Ahh, that's currently what we do with ours... although it's a bit of a messy approach. Currently we do ours like: Qualification/Subject/Class memberships go this way (all our students have their admission number stored in their user accounts in active directory) SIMS -> MyAwesomeSpecialDecoderApp -> Active Directory This ends in each qualification/subject/class having it's own group in AD with the members as appropriate. The app then auto creates the courses in moodle to match qualifications. It then enrolls the students that apply. As a last step, it also creates the class groups in each course so staff can assign things by group if they wish. This is all very well but we've found it's not very flexible. For example, some teachers are wanting to create their own courses (I.e. Y7 ICT Homework). So we're currently looking at another method by using meta courses and cohort syncing. This will basically allow us to define the cohorts available (Subjects, qualifications and classes) and then when you create a new course (be it manually or automatically) you can assign which ever cohort you choose. I'm currently working on the app which will sync all that. Ours will be doing it via AD too, but it's trivial to make it direct to Moodle. It should also involve a moodle side plugin to allow XMLRPC rather than having direct access to the DB to the server your running the syncing app from should only need https access to the moodle server.

Yeh I was aware of that but I'm not aware of anything Capita offers that actually uses SIF in SIMS? Although certainly wasnt aware of third party agents! I'll look in to them, assuming they don't charge a silly amount then that could be very useful! As you'll know various versions have been around for yonks... yet annoyingly it doesn't seem to have taken off (not from my part of the forest in the front-line anyway). I love the idea of it and as a developer it makes a stupidly massive difference in just making "it" work. Communication between all common education systems is what I'm always striving to achieve... but there always has to be hacks to get things to talk (albeit it, one way most of the time) together. I personally am using command reporter to drag the info out of SIMS in to various systems and apps as that's the only way I can do it without breaking any contracts/terms etc. However I've if the SIF agents for SIMS work out, then things will be changing pretty rapidly paulgarratt83: If these agents are cheap enough for the integration I need, then I may very well be able to help out!

Interestingly enough, I've just been looking back over the SIF specifications for the UK and the last it was updated was Nov 2011 so it still seems to be around. I wonder if we can extract any kind of response from Capita to if they are going to support it in SIMS.

Oh man, as with all things "buzzy"... it's totally died off. I put loads of work/research in to doing a C# implementation of the SIF framework only to find that I could not find anything to link in to SIMS. I know Capita do some kind of developer kit but you have to pay a ridiculous fee for it... just to link in to a number of DLLs (There are of course other technical solutions/possibilities, but I could never endorse anything that does not follow various terms of use etc). I havnt heard the SIF buzzword in aggesssss. Currently everything is one way from SIMS. I have various apps which sit on servers that run imported reports in sims (via the commandreporter.exe) and then transfered to the site for processing via HTTPS XMLRPC. Basically, read only. But without paying for developer access, I can only dream of writing to SIMS. Interestingly enough, i'm currently working on an agent to link in to Moodle FROM sims (auto creating groups/enrolments etc). What are you looking to do?

bringing this one back from the dead... they've registered yet another domain! - Jill Rose They are determined to spam, i'll give them that.

Got to give him credit for his determination though. I just nabbed the CD's when I was in school

No Gave up on remoteapps and just went with a plain TS server. Set it up so when they RDP in to it using the sonicwall box it gives them a locked down environment just like any workstation in school. Also set it so it auto launches SIMS (via GPO). Not the route I wanted but a good enough solution at the time.

We received two more last night. Coincidentally, they also use another domain (grenergie.com) from "nina".

Indeed, possibily married to Gavin Rose who was MD

Okay so we've been getting numerous e-mails from these people for a few months. At first it was just one or two a week but recently it's escalated to one a day and at one point, bounced up to about 4 or 5 in a single day. Our head decided to look in to their claims of "free solar electricity for schools" and decided that even though we would want to do this, we're not in a position to do so at the moment and left a message on their answer machine. Our front office team decided that we were getting too many e-mails from this company so after several ignored requests to remove us from their list... asked me to chase it up. 3 or 4 requests later, still getting them. So I ring them and end up having a conversation with a very rude woman who claimed was the person sending these emails. She ended up saying "Only the head teacher can request this" and hung the phone up. Finally send her an e-mail just saying because of the rude conversation and complete disregard for my request, we've added the company to our blacklist etc. To which we get this reply: As your'll see from the reply, I looked into this company and noticed that "Gavin" from NS Optimum had registered the domain (under his home address) with his work e-mail. After the massive issues we had getting off their spam lists and the totally rude and forceful sales tactics I'm now not surprised to her response. Funnily enough, later that day she sent me another e-mail "Friends?". Has anyone dealt with this company? What has been their experience. We now have no interest to go with them because of this!

Should be asking vBulletin Solutions

Well done ZH. Handled a **** situation very well!

If you're not shy, try Zenoss. Best thing is, it's all opensource and free. It can monitor pretty much anything via either agents installed on the servers or via SNMP (for switches, printers etc). Just shout if you want some links to guides/documentation.

Awesome!

Or you could check the uptime? Each check, log the time it ran and the uptime, then next time it ran use the two plus the new time and new uptime and some logic to see if the uptime is less than the time difference between time last checked and current time.